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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Is Cuba Gearing Up to Go Online?

Internet usage in Cuba isn’t anywhere near as restrictive as it is in North Korea, but it sure is painful. With connections only possible via satellite, the cost of getting online in the tropical communist paradise is extremely prohibitive for the vast majority of its citizens – not to mention as slow as molasses.

Tourists report that the internet is so bad in Cuba that even sending out something as simple as an email can be laboriously slow – which means you can usually forget all about trying to connect to image-heavy sites like Facebook. In addition, internet connections are pretty damn rare too, usually being limited to hotels popular with foreigners and government buildings.

However, this state of affairs might be about to change, with researchers saying that Cuban internet activity has shown some sparks of life in recent weeks. Increased connectivity could bring about more openness in one of the world’s most tightly controlled nations, although we should probably refrain from lighting up a Havana cigar in celebration for the time being.

One of the problems Cuba has faced in getting connected is the embargo placed on it by the US, which means that running an undersea cable the short distance to Florida is out of the question. To circumvent this, Cuba instead laid an undersea cable southwards, connecting the country to friendly Venezuela, but since completing this project in 2011 the cable has, well, just laid there.

Now though, web traffic monitors at Renesys say that the cable has suddenly sparked into life, albeit rather curiously. According to them, the cable is now seeing some traffic – only it appears to be exclusively inbound.

“In the past week, our global monitoring system has picked up indications that this cable has finally been activated, although in a rather curious way,” said researcher Doug Madory in a blog post.

Madory said that the signs were encouraging, as they came on the same day as Cuba announced it was doing away with a long-standing requirement that all citizens obtain an exit visa before leaving the country. However, he points out that even though the island now has a (slightly) faster connection, the majority of people still cannot get online:

Interestingly, for a nation that seems to want to keep its citizens so tightly under the thumb, Cuba doesn’t seem to employ any kind of censorship in the style of China’s Great Firewall. However, the Cuban regime does at least appear to keep tabs on what its citizens get up to online, as the recent arrest of activist blogger Yoani Sanchez reminds us.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.